If you could look directly into the curatorial zeitgeist in the United States, what would you see? It occurs to me that one way to think about that question is to look at which artists are being shown simultaneously in temporary shows at museums across the country.
I’ve spent the last few weeks sifting through the exhibition programs of 200 U.S. museums, trying to discover the names that recur most in terms of who was on view in the month of September. It’s near impossible to be totally comprehensive, and the exercise involves plenty of subjectivity on my part when it comes to measuring importance. Because I’m most interested in breadth of influence, I don’t make any distinctions between bigger and smaller institutions. I rank career retrospectives highly, followed by solo exhibitions, special commissions, biennial appearances, and then inclusions in thematic group shows.
Despite the inevitable limitations of the exercise, it felt worthwhile to me. It makes visible the status of artists whose influence I might otherwise not have noticed. I decided to highlight 5 because it seemed like there was the clearest case to be made for them as concentrating attention.
What do the results suggest about the curatorial zeitgeist? Museums right now continue to be very focused on elevating minority voices—this is probably the central theme here. A rhetoric of community engagement and historical education dominates. Notably, neither traditional painting-on-canvas nor new media are central here; these artists mainly lean towards installation and sculpture, working with materials that have symbolic connections to community and tradition.
1. Marie Watt
Marie K. Watt, Blanket Stories: Great Grandmother, Pandemic, Daybreak (2021). Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Photo by Kevin McConnell.
No artist is having a museum moment right now like Marie Watt (b. 1967). Art lovers can see her work on view across the country right now, literally from Anchorage to Austin.
A member of the Seneca Nation, the Yale-trained, Portland, Oregon-based artist makes art about Indigenous history and knowledge, often working with blankets and textiles. She’s particularly known for working in collaboration, sometimes convening sewing circles. “As an Indigenous person, I think it is important to share that there is no word for ‘art’ in our language, but it is an activity—the activity of being creative and inventive,” she once explained to the Art in Embassies program.
EXHIBITIONS:
—“Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt” at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, through October 20, 2024
—“Marie Watt: Land Stitches Water Sky” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, through September 22, 2024
—“Marie Watt: Sky Dances Light,” at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, through October 20, 2024
GROUP SHOWS:
—“Soft Power” at the Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, closed September 1, 2024
—“The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” at the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut, closed September 15, 2024
—“Time Travelers: Foundations, Transformations, and Expansions at the Centennial” at the Tucson Museum of Art, through October 6, 2024
—“Future Dreaming… A Path Forward” at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California, through November 10, 2024
—“Finding Home” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, through December 1, 2024
—“How to Survive” at the Anchorage Museum, through January 19, 2025
—“Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue” at the Albuquerque Museum, through March 2, 2025
“Jess T. Dugan: Look at me like you love me” on view at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Photo by Raul Alejandro, courtesy GRAM.
The St. Louis-based Dugan (b. 1986) is best known for tender photographic portraits of queer and transgender subjects. “Because my work has elements of queer visibility and queer representation, I’m very aware that to a queer audience, it might function as a possibility model or a life-affirming representation of something that they need to see,” Dugan told Paulette Beete of the NEA. “And that can be really powerful. For people who don’t identify as queer or as part of the LGBTQ community, that same work has the potential to be educational. On a core level, I’m making work to make sense of my own life and to make sense of the complicated parts of living.”
EXHIBITIONS:
—“Jess T. Dugan: Look at Me Like You Love Me” at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, though September 28, 2024
—“To Survive on This Shore” at the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport, through October 27, 2024
—“Jess T. Dugan: I Want You to Know My Story” at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida, through February 22, 2025
GROUP SHOWS:
—“The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity” at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, through December 15, 2024
—“Femme n’ isms, Part II: Flashpoints in Photography” at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, through January 18, 2025
—“Shifting Perceptions” at the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, through September 23, 2024
—“Tender Loving Care” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through January 12, 2025
—“Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency” at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, from September 28, 2024 to February 2, 2025
Suchitra Mattai, Pappy’s house (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
The Guyanese American artist (b. 1973) regularly works in fabric—indeed, one of her signature materials is cut-up saris. In terms of subject matter, she draws on her family’s history as part of the South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, as with her recent show at ICA San Francisco which included a vibrant, colorful sculptural recreation of her grandparents’ home (the show travels to the Seattle Art Museum next year).
“I’m really interested in the role of memory in unravelling and reimagining colonial narratives…,” Mattai explained in a lecture for the University of Colorado, Boulder art and architecture department in 2021. “I am interested in giving voice to those whose voices were quieted in the past, and those whose voices are currently quieted, such as women and people of color. I look a lot to the past, and consider my work to be both narrative and autobiographical.”
EXHIBITIONS:
—“she walked in reverse and found their songs” at the ICA San Francisco, closed September 15, 2024
—“Suchitra Mattai: Myth From Matter” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., through January 12, 2025
—”Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls” at the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida, through March 15, 2025
GROUP SHOWS:
—”Prospect 2024” at the MCA San Diego, through September 22, 2024
—“The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean” at the Americas Society, New York, through December 14, 2024
Installation view of “Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2024. Photo by Alex Barber. © Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Theaster Gates Studio.
Gates (b. 1973) has been one of the most high-profile contemporary artists for more than a decade now. It doesn’t hurt that he has leveraged his market power to open what is in effect his own museum, the Stony Island Arts Bank/Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, where he’s just opened “When the Clouds Roll Away,” a three-floor institution creating a “fictive, contemporary Black publishing company” based on the Johnson Publishing Company, which put out Jet and Ebony.
Meanwhile, down in Houston, the ambitious “The Gift and The Renege” responds to the history of Freedmen’s Town in the city’s Fourth Ward, a community built by former enslaved people. Curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Hesse McGraw, that exhibition is part of the multi-year “Rebirth in Action: Telling the Story of Freedom” initiative, a collaboration between Gates, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and the Freedmen’s Town Conservancy. According to W, it dovetails with “the artist’s desire for a slower practice.” Be that as it may, Gates is still everywhere.
EXHIBITIONS:
—“The Gift and The Renege” at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, through October 20, 2024
—“Theaster Gates: Wonder Working Power” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, through January 1, 2025
—“Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away” at the Stony Island Art Bank, Chicago, through March 16, 2025
GROUP SHOWS:
—“The Black Home as Public Art” at the Mebane Gallery of the University of Texas at Austin, through November 15, 2024
—“When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History” at the Dallas Museum of Art, through April 13, 2025
Justin Favela, CONERICOT (2024). Photo courtesy the New Britain Museum of Art.
The Las Vegas-based artist (b. 1986) is above all known for his big and colorful installations that take inspiration from a very specific source: the piñata. A signature has been full-sized piñata lowrider cars, which scored Favela a special spotlight via the Museum of Sonoma’s current “Cruisin’” show about lowrider culture. He also makes murals that employ the methods of cartoneria, or piñata-making, like those currently spotlighted at the New Britain Museum of Art with their joyful feathered paper surfaces.
Favela has just published a monograph, Justin Favela: Fantasía/Fantasy, bringing together a decade of his practice in all media. It’s published on newsprint—an homage to a material that forms the foundation of piñatas.
EXHIBITIONS:
—“Cruisin’: Sonoma County Lowriders and the Art of Justin Favela” at the Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, California, through November 24, 2024
—“Justin Favela: Do You See What I See?” at the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, through January 26, 2025
GROUP SHOWS:
—“Finding La Yarda” at the Lawrence Art Center in Lawrence, Kansas, through September 21, 2024
—“Popol Vuh and the Art of Maya Storytelling” at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, through September 22, 2024
—“Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium” at the Barrick Museum at the University of Las Vegas, through November 23, 2024
—“Xican-a.o.x. Body” at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, through March 30, 2025
Also Having a Museum Moment:
Ed Ruscha
Simone Leigh
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz
Hank Willis Thomas
Isaac Julien
KAWS
Dyani White Hawk
Jenny Holzer
Shinique Smith